Aspect
by monkeycrackmary
Summary: Vincent's Lolita.


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Note: the disclaimer for this story can be found at the end. Spoilers for all three games.  
  
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The park. After than man with the old stains invisible on his skin and the little girl with the sharp tongue were gone, she went to the park.  
  
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The town was lulling itself back to sleep, a sleeping wolf with one eye always looking for stray lambs.   
  
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Sun was rising, creatures vanishing like night-shadows. But not her. Even after all that, never her.  
  
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Her curse, to be what that bereaved bitter man had thought he wanted - always young, surviving death after death after death. The whore in the virgin's mirror. Forever and ever, amen.   
  
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Turning to face the young man who lounged indolently on one of the stone benches, she made herself forget. Wondered if black widow spiders felt something similar when they lost their mate-prey despite all efforts. Her hair was blonde with black at the tips, the red darkened like old rusty blood. She looked down at the sailor suit with its wide white collar and prim blue skirt and raised an eyebrow at the young man.  
  
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"You're worse than James," she said teasingly, scuffing one neat shoe on the ground.   
  
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"Succubus," he said back with a smile that made her think of a hyena. Hunters, scavengers, Silent Hill drew them like nectar in a flytrap.   
  
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"So do I look like her? The girl in the sailor suit?"  
  
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"No." The man stood. He was tall, traces of adolescent acne still dusting his face. A well-tailored jacket and mud-spattered hems on his pants, soiled elegance. "Not at all."  
  
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"Really?" She raised an eyebrow, twisting from side to side. The lake smelt like wet metal behind her.   
  
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"No..." the man said as he came in closer. "Not at all."  
  
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It was good to feel someone warm against her.   
  
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There was a book he read as a teenager, kept and dog-eared over the years, eventually shoved behind the bibles and texts and scriptures on his office shelves. /i. He'd wondered from time to time if Lolita had hated Annabel, for daring to reincarnate herself in little Dolores and move once again into the dance around her Humbert, never asking if the part that was Lo and never Annabel had wanted it.  
  
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Lolita, Dolores, Lo. So many names for one soul. Alessa, Cheryl, Heather. Aspects of a singular.  
  
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He loved Heather's harshness, her hate. It made her real, made her true. No fantasy would be so inconvenient. It was strange to be the elder of the pair now, after his twelve years beside Alessa's fourteen on that single perfect night so long ago.  
  
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He'd loved her before that, of course. Couldn't remember a time when he wasn't paying visits to the room where she lay in her fever dreams. Children were not common in the Order, and he'd found himself fascinated by the beautiful - yes, she was beautiful, even draped in her bandages and the smell of sickness - girl who would be God.   
  
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He'd read her stories, chatted on with the mindless prattle of the young. And then, one night not so different from any other, the world dipped and swayed and P  
  
Her soul came back from its hiding-place, grown strong enough now to shape a body for itself that wasn't ruined with scars and sores. And she had much to do, of course, plans to set in motion and other plans to delay, but yet somehow she found a brief bright moment to come to his side.  
  
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"Vincent," she'd whispered, and he'd almost fainted with surprise. Boys of his age were encouraged to engage in long periods of fasting to boost their constitution, and he'd had nothing to eat for days. She had a greasy paper bag clutched in one white hand, full of french fries and two squashed hamburgers. She sat down on his bed and tore it open, grinning at his shock and speechlessness.  
  
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"You think /i hungry?" she asked playfully. "I haven't had anything that wasn't administered via a drip since I was /i." She paused, delicately picking the gherkins out of her burger. "I do, however, remember my opinion of these."  
  
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"Alessa... but... you... Alessa?" he'd murmured, blinking the sleep out of his eyes and groping for his glasses on the nightstand.   
  
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"She's trying to birth God, I can feel it twitching." Alessa munched on a handful of fries, a thoughtful expression on her heart-shaped face. Vincent's breath had caught in his throat, for he'd always thought her lovely but now she seemed to /i with the perfection of her form.   
  
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"How can you..."  
  
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"I don't want to talk about that now." Alessa sounded irritated. "Eat your burger."  
  
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And so he had eaten with her, and talked about poems and stories and other small things. And she'd laughed at a joke, and Vincent had known like a ray of bright light in his eyes that he had fallen in love with her.  
  
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All too soon, she'd left again, standing up and sighing. Her coltish young shoulders had slumped, in depression or exhaustion or defeat, and she'd smiled a final time at him. "Go back to sleep, Vincent. When you wake up, you can pretend you dreamed me."  
  
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He'd yawned, suddenly so sleepy. Fought it, fought the lethargy she'd commanded into him. "Alessa..." he'd said. "I'll know you were real, the world will have been born anew by morning."  
  
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"No." She'd looked so sad, so determined. "God will not be born, Vincent. Can't you see what this world can give us? All the pleasure, all the joy..."  
  
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In his now half-asleep state, her sacrilege had seemed so sensible that he'd never believed anything else since.   
  
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"I will come back," she whispered as he slipped back into confused nightmares. "Don't forget me." Her lips brushed against his, light as wind.  
  
iOh, Alessa/i, he'd wanted to say. iHow could I?P  
  
She'd won, of course. God's rising was thwarted, and she'd birthed herself to live again.   
  
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And Vincent had waited, and worshipped the memories of the mother and the child of God that he still loved.   
  
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And he waited. And waited.  
  
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And there was Maria, for a time, who had perhaps never truly let go of her James. It's difficult to get over the one you were born to love, after all. Most called her /i, but a creature born from desire and the energy of God should surely be called /i as well. Whatever she was, she stayed in Silent Hill and pretended that she wasn't lost and empty.   
  
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But that was a sad story, of a woman who could never be more than an echo created out of a memory polished from absent fondness. Nothing like Heather.  
  
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Ah, Heather. Nothing like Alessa, whose skin had never been out in the sun to earn the freckles that adorned Heather's face. Alessa never had the chance to wear such clothes, to learn such coarse ways of speaking. Poor Heather-Lolita, so much herself but still ultimately the rebirth of another.   
  
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Heather who couldn't bear to face the truth of what fighting for one's life could be, who shaped her enemies into monsters and fairytale enemies. But God was clever, so clever, so much more than Claudia fancied She could be. God sent a creature who wore Alessa's lost face, the burn skin and the pain-bright eyes. And Heather fought it, as she had fought so many other foes that night.   
  
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And then, the battle over, the echo defeated, Heather had closed her eyes in confusion and muttered to herself. She murmured of memories of hospital rooms and pain and pain and pain, and despite all that pain the overwhelming will to survive.  
  
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Heather began, though she did not know it, to P  
  
And Vincent watched from the shadows, and smiled the smile that had once reminded Maria of hyenas.   
  
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Then Claudia, stupid silly Claudia with her lofty ideas and inability to see all that the world already had all that God could wish it to contain, with her knife that hurt like an anvil to the lungs. It wasn't /i, not when Heather was so close to doing as Alessa had done so long ago. Surely this time she would survive it, surely this time they would have each other when it was over.   
  
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He'd heard her, hadn't he? In the confessional (ah, how he loved to listen in on confessions. It was fascinating, the things people were only willing to share with their God and not other). Speaking in a voice that sounded less like the brash Heather-voice and more like the memory of another's laughing tones, the sound of a girl sneaking into his room one night as the world ended. Accepting the role of God, saviour, redeemer.  
  
i"I forgive you,"/i Alessa had whispered to the crying parishioner.   
  
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But now it was too late, and Claudia's knife cut between his ribs, and it wasn't fair.  
  
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Time passed, and Vincent waited for that single spark left alive in himself to dim and die. He'd always been tenacious, though, and it seemed as if it would be a long dark painful ride down into hell before he gave up his grip on life. Noise and light and tremors in a world far away from the place his mind had run to, shouts and cries and the smell of burnt blood.   
  
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Then... how long had it been? Years, perhaps. Centuries. Or seconds? Hours? Then someone was propping him up, holding a cup of water to his lips.  
  
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"I've killed him, Vincent," a voice whispered as he gulped greedily at the liquid. "Douglas. I didn't want to, really. He was... kind. There are not many kind people in this world. But he didn't seem to mind, really. Said he understood. Maybe he was humouring me. But he's dead anyway. There's nobody left in the world who knows who we are. Nobody who cares about the girl who refused to birth a God, or a Father of a fallen cult. We're P  
  
"You..." Vincent rasped, for she was beyond names now.   
  
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And, of course, she still wore the clothes of her journey home, stained and marked and bloodied. She looked as beautiful as she ever had, as beautiful as the burned girl in her delirium and the visitor in the night. Vincent, his vest wet with blood and his lungs agony inside his ribs, found himself thinking of Maria. She'd worn the sailor suit in a strange mocking re-enactment of a lost love, just as she'd worn Mary Sunderland's face to tempt James.   
  
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But it had never worked, in the end. Love sees through disguises.  
  
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"Yes, me." The reply came after a pause. "The hospital should be ordinary again by now. Let's get you there. And then, I think, a burger and some fries. Feels like I haven't eaten in P  
  
Disclaimer: Konami's, not mine, la la la. Assumes 'good' ending for first game, 'leave' ending for second game, and 'possessed' ending for third. P 


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